JACK NEO CHEE KEONG is rarely lost for words. As Singapore's best-known comedian and filmmaker, the 46-year-old is famed for being a subversive motor mouth, filling first his television shows and then his films with torrents of acerbic social satire - this is, after all, a man whose artistic standing stemmed from his roles as a feisty old woman and a pesky, middle-aged housewife in one of the city state's longest-running television comedies.
But the word that has Neo stuttering is 'government' - or, to be exact, the one in his native Singapore. Having made I Not Stupid, a film explicitly criticising the country's elitist social-engineering programmes - with schoolchildren being streamed into ranks on their academic performances - Neo is hardly likely to worry about making damning statements about how Singapore is run.
Worried he was when he was asked whether the Singaporean authorities are showing little appreciation for the punishing work ethic of the common people - a theme that runs through I Not Stupid Too, the sequel to the film that propelled him (and Singaporean cinema) to region-wide recognition.
'In Singapore ... ' he trails off. He starts again. 'I think our government is now ... ' Pause. 'I think now they appreciate people more when people try to do something - before, they never encouraged you,' he says, finally. 'I was invited to a prime minister's talking session and I was one of the members, and we were allowed to ask questions and he mentioned that too.'
His popularity with those in power possibly explains his hesitancy in speaking candidly. When he unleashed I Not Stupid, film critics and political commentators were astonished by how Neo tears apart a system that was the making of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father and Minister Mentor to his son, the current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. While the satire is mild when compared to its foreign counterparts and financed by Raintree Pictures, a filmmaking arm of the country's official broadcasters MediaCorps, the film was still hailed as a risky step into the political unknown.
Four years on and Neo's social standing has altered dramatically. While he could never be considered an outspoken dissident - a label that usually carries with it imprisonment and exclusion from public life, as experienced by opposition politician Chia Thye Poh or the late dramatist Kuo Pao Kun - the filmmaker has danced with danger with the barbed social commentary in I Not Stupid. After more than a decade in television, he made Money Not Enough in 1998, a film that hits out at the rat race and the cynicism it breeds as the city state embraces turbo-capitalism.